British painter and sculptor who studied at the Slade School of Art between 1910 and 1911. Between 1912 and 1918, he travelled abroad and only after 1920 began to concentrate on painting, under the strong influence of Modernism. On his visits to Paris, Nicholson discovered modernist ideas: the works of the Italian Primitives and the African tribes as well as the painting of Cézanne, Rousseau, Picasso, Matisse and Braque. In 1924, he was invited to be a member of the 7 & 5 Society and held his first one-man show at the Twenty-One Gallery in London. His interest in Cubism is clear in a number of his works of this period and is implicit in some dating from later periods. It was in 1924 that Nicholson experimented for the first time with Abstract painting. Between 1932 and 1933, he went on various visits to Paris where he discovered the work of such artists as Arp, Miró, Mondrian and Calder. In 1933 he was invited, together with Barbara Hepworth, to join the Abstraction-Création and Unit One groups. During the 50s, his work was recognised through the awarding of various international prizes, namely the Guggenheim International Painting Prize (1956) and the Prémio Internacional de Pintura at the 1957 Sao Paulo Biennale. In 1969, the Tate Gallery in London held a second major retrospective. Nicholson continued working and exhibiting unto the end of his life.
